Value in Scarcity
When something exists in scarcity, it’s human nature to consider it more valuable—it’s simple economics. Back in our youth, with only 20 hardcopy movies sitting in our library, each film was as precious as it was breakable. Physical media can get damaged from scratches, rips, and dings, making each rewatch all the more important. It’s obvious that this strong connection to the media of our past has caused us modern adults to form a somewhat obsessive attachment to it. Making us manifest our memories in the form of nostalgic recollections.
Via u/thenostalgicmillennialpodcast
Nostalgia isn’t always a positive thing, though. The Greek definition of the word literally translates to “return” and “pain” and was used to describe sad, homesick sailors. However, these days, it describes a far more complex emotional state. While nostalgia was once heavily connotated as a negative feeling, in the post-Internet era, living in the past and looking back at the simpler times of our youth is bittersweet.
“Memory is a highly inaccurate reconstruction,” says neuroscience professor Matt Johnson Ph.D. “When it comes to this nostalgic longing for the past, the reconstructive process of memory skews positive.” As we recall the days of our youth, we forget the family fights and the turmoil, we block out the lost wrestling battles with our cousins, and we hide away in a pillow fort constructed from the memorized scripts of our favorite childhood movies. Psychologically, it’s only natural to seek the positive parts of our memories through nostalgia, basking in what Dr. Johnson calls the “warm glow of the past.”
Despite our favorite memories being largely skewed, they’re still regarded as a highly valuable callback to our sense of self. Paige Eldridge, a writer for the cultural magazine, Unwinnable says, “[nostalgia] is a normal side effect of longing for simpler, more youthful times, and awareness of the reality that times change, and we change too.” Grasping at the straws of our youth, we latch onto our concrete memories, often tied to our strongest memory receptors of sight, sound, and touch—so something like, our precious VHS collection.
But new generations won’t have the same ties to their childhood movies largely because of a lack of scarcity. In the streaming era, where you can pretty much watch anything you want at any time, so kids won’t have the same emotional ties to their favorite movies. They may only watch Moana or Ponyo a handful of times because there are literally 1000s of other kid-friendly movies for them to binge and an innumerable number of kids’ shows on YouTube. Modern children will never have to rummage for hours through a mountain of dusty bins in the attic to find an old VHS, because they can click around on a screen for a total of three seconds before finding suitable entertainment.
Via u/thenostalgicmillennialpodcast
Lost in the onslaught of sheer volume, the nostalgia of future generations isn’t chained to their content. It’s not to say that content has decreased in quality, in fact, as an avid movie-watcher and TV-show-binger, I’d say that visual media and storytelling has only gotten better. However, there is a pleasure in repetition and a comfort in the predictability of re-watched content, which is why the movies of our childhood will never be shaken or replaced.
Even now, nothing tops a nostalgia-fueled movie night with popcorn, delivery pizza, and an unearthed copy of the Shrek DVD, complete with special features, bloopers, and deleted scenes from Far Far Away Idol.
Pleasure Cruise on a Tsunami
80s, 90s, and even 2000s kids are stuck ruminating on the good ol’ days, dwelling in the golden nostalgia of their younger years and clinging to their youth through the memory of physical media. Wiped out by the age of infinity, the scarcity of media is no longer a phenomenon that grips our memory formation. We don’t need to beg our parents to take us to Blockbuster on a Friday night to pick out a movie for our sleepover and we don’t need to make unfair trades with our cousins for a pathetic Blueray DVD collection. Modern content may be decent, but it’s way too oversaturated to carry the same weight as the movies of yore.
Physical media, and the movies we remember from that era, are a reminder of our impermanence, because as technology ages, we age with it. Truthfully, nobody is quite ready to cope with that inescapable fate, so instead, we escape and take a day trip down memory lane alongside our childhood favorites, indulging in the moments that make us feel like Ferris Bueller, taking a day off from adulthood.
Via u/xennial.kid